


I Have Measured Out My Life With Coffee Spoons

by stella_bella



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV First Person, POV John Watson, Season/Series 03, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 00:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stella_bella/pseuds/stella_bella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John tries to find his way following the events of "The Reichenbach Fall".  Spoilers through "The Sign of Three".  </p><p>Trying something new with this; please give it a shot even if you don't usually read first person (I don't usually read it myself, and I never write it, so who knows where this came from).</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Have Measured Out My Life With Coffee Spoons

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot. 
> 
> This was written without a beta or Brit-pick; feel free to comment with any mistakes (or for any reason really - I love feedback!)

Maybe it’s time to get up.

The tea is cold on the nightstand, and everything is quiet against the grey flat sky outside.

It’s been three days, or maybe more, maybe more like a month; three weeks, three bells in the morning watch and it’s time, it’s far past time, but a storm’s blowing in, grey clouds and rain with a howling wind.

Maybe I should get up now.

The tea looks black. If I try hard I can imagine it’s solid, a cylinder of ice in a porcelain coffin. Funny how things don’t freeze at the bottom of the ocean, drowned and lost, dead and buried but not frozen; the sea moves them, dances them along the mudflats and coral caves, and their eyes are open and glazed flat and colourless like ice.

Maybe I’ve sat here long enough. I get morbid too quickly now.

The sky is a bruise on a dead man’s throat, but he’s not here to tell me where it came from, or why, or how it relates to the woman on the street below wearing the red boots or the lad who nearly got killed by a cab when he was chasing his ball, the toy shiny and smooth and black, a beetle on a corpse, a frozen lifeless eye, and the bruise spreads when I’m not looking but I can’t always be looking, can I. I can’t always make myself look.

Here I am, alone in a room, and the whole world is a crime scene with no one to solve it.

Maybe I should get up, dump the tea. I’m holding the spoon; when did that happen? It’s warm from my fingers but that’s impossible since my fingers are dead cold and stiff, it's impossible, or not, maybe just improbable, is that what he’d say? Maybe, I don’t know, jesus how can I not know, it’s only been a month. Three weeks. Three weeks at sea and my fingers are still ice and bone and they clink over the dull silvery surface of the spoon as I watch. I haven’t got anything else to do.

The tea is black, and endless, and so very cold. If I stare too long I’ll drown.

\---

The streets lead me on, the next and the next and the next, and every time it’s just one more block, one more alley, five more minutes, and then the night is thick and black and the lights swallowed up.

I call Harry. She doesn’t pick up.

I don’t know who else to call. I don’t know where I am. It’s late, it’s very late but I don’t know exactly how bad it is because the numbers on my mobile are blurry and bright and when I blink they blur up again too quickly to read, and what’s the point anyway when I don’t know where I am or how to get there from here.

Why won’t you tell me, why can’t you tell me where I am and how to get back home because I haven’t got the answers, I never have, that was your job, we agreed, we promised in more and in less than words, and I’m still here, very loyal very quickly, holding up my end of the bargain; I’m still asking and looking but you never answer and you won’t, not ever, not anymore. The night is dark behind me and inside me and it is late.

It’s time to go. I should go. My feet are frozen to the ground, and a storm is rolling up the river from the sea. Maybe it’s my storm.

The streets bend away, dim lights in a line that spread together, watery yellow when I blink, and there are no answers there.

\---

The woman in the shop says her name is Mary. She laughs when I startle at her outstretched hand, when I juggle three tins of beans and a packet of tea to clasp that hand, a bit clumsily, out of practice and strange. Her fingers are warm and dry, and mine don’t want to let go.

The lights are too bright, there is no space for darkness to hide, so it crouches under the bottom shelves, in the far corner by the door to the supply room before her smile banishes it and I hardly notice. Her eyes smile even after her mouth is done.

It’s early, or late maybe, but time is not a thing I can think about anymore, not when there’s so much of it left, waiting in the corners of my life.

She doesn’t care, doesn’t see the shadows or hear the clock, and maybe that’s what I need. She says yes when I ask her about dinner, and there’s a little bistro not far from here, with real linen tablecloths and little oil lamps so that the darkness is safe to lurk unnoticed around the legs of the tables and the far edges of the room, and I can reach down a hand into the chill and be assured that it’s there, that this isn’t cheating, this letting in the light a little bit. It’s been a long time.

She goes, and her hair is a halo under the lights. I blink a few times, steadying myself, and the beans are still in my hands. I haven’t dropped them.

It’s time to go.

\---

She makes a lovely cup of tea, but her kettle has a rust spot under the edge and the mugs are chipped and spider-webbed with grey. The spoons don’t match.

She chatters as her tea cools, but I drink mine hot and fast, let it warm my clumsy stiff fingers, unused to the feel of skin and hair, to holding someone else inside their grasp, which isn’t great at the best of times, because look what happened when I let go, look what slipped through, got away, fell.

The sky is bright and white, and when I squint she touches the lines round my eyes and something in her face goes soft, and I drink it in with my tea, let it warm the insides of myself, all the dark cold icy places left behind my ribs.

They won’t melt, not yet, they’re stubborn like me, which is what he always said, didn’t he, he laughed about it mostly but sometimes there was frustration and it never bothered me because there was also time.

I leave my spoon in my mug when it’s time to go.

\---

I call Harry. She doesn’t answer. I wonder if she’s dead, too.

\---

Mary grabs me by the hand one day and pulls, and we are in a quiet, shady little park with a basket of things which are probably very expected and tasty and ordinary. I am grateful.

She smiles, and her eyes are blue in the sun. Even the shade under the trees is half-hearted, more green than black and smelling of cut grass and heated air.

This is nice, more than nice, this is normal; and I close my eyes against the bright yellow heat, so unusual for this time of year, but it fills me up and the ticking of the clock is muffled, honey-slow, and her hand is in mine.

She pulls away to rifle through the basket, odds and ends piled around, and for a moment there is dirt heaped and a hole in the ground, but then she laughs, and it’s fine. I forgot the spoons, she laments. How can we eat dessert without spoons?

She is so scatterbrained it’s lovely, and I kiss her nose, her cheeks, her lips. She is soft, and warm, and smells of sunshine. Oh, John.

We eat the pudding with our fingers, and I swallow her up with my eyes, gobble her tousled golden hair and her self-deprecating smiles, her spontaneity and joy, and she is good for me, she is very good, and hours in the sun have melted all the ice.

Look, she says, a spoon. And there is one, dirty, on the side of the gravel path. She carries the picnic basket, everything tossed pell-mell inside but how could you ever see it, and the red checkered cloth is so cheerful.

I stop and pick up the spoon, rub the gritted dirt into my fingers. It smells of earth and the darkness that comes of being buried, alone and forgotten, waiting for the light.

She’s ahead, on the road, yelling for me to come on, and she doesn’t look back but I follow. Of course I do.

\---

It takes me a while, or maybe several months shy of a while; well, yes, all right, less than a year, and the wind calms, the storm blows itself out; it’s eight bells in the mid-watch, and dawn breaks over the edge of the city like a wave over a ship.

The store is small, select, and I clear my throat and clasp my hands behind my back. Too many breakable things in breakable cases, and my own hairline fractures reflected over and over in the polished panes.

Diamonds sparkle like nothing else, literally, and I’ve been to three continents and all that. The salesman holds them up for approval, but they look all the same, and my throat goes dry, tongue thick and clumsy, and he sees and takes pity, lays them down abandoned on the velvet and he asks about her, and I grab for the line, the desperation of a drowning man. I tell. It’s still new, the words still come easy.

He listens and nods, thoughtfully, and then pulls one from a hidden tray, and it’s small but not too small, neat and compact like she is, like her life and her flat with the narrow, dusted shelves of books and the windowsill garden, everything in its place and me just another thing to fold up and tuck away next to the faded linens.

I nod, and he lets me hold it.

Turning it over in my fingers is a surprise; I thought it’d be colder, the way it glitters.

It hides in my pocket for a week, a lump of ice in my trouser, next to my leg, the bad one, the one that hasn’t bothered me, since, well, a long time. A very long time.

I run my fingers over it when she’s not there, closing my eyes and feeling the facets catch on my skin, on my fading trigger callous.

\---

I choose the restaurant based on a recommendation from a friend at work.

It’s pricey, elegant, a bit out of my league, honestly, and I haven’t worn a suit in ages but the crispness of the shirt collar keeps me alert; the cold nudge of cufflinks to the pulse point. I’m going to do this, of course I am, how can I not, she is good for me and to me and I have never felt so normal, so safe, in my life.

It’s what everyone wants, and I’ve got it. I’ve got her.

The cufflinks warm to my skin while I wait, and my whole body is warm when she walks down the stairs, no one looking except me, yet it feels like an audience, like a spotlit performance, and her lines fall neatly from a lipsticked mouth, and mine get stuck somewhere between my dry lips and the white linen.

And then.

Oh. Oh no. No no no. Christ.

It’s not, it can’t, it isn’t. No.

I can’t. I can’t.

Mary tells me later that I stared, and stammered, and generally gave a good showing of being completely dumbstruck. I only know that somewhere the dam broke, and the ice was no longer ice but a raging torrent, a river and a flood and my hand was trembling, my voice unsteady and it was so hard to look and impossible not to, and I’d forgotten the feel of the water closing over my head, the grey-blue of his eyes like ice.

She tells me I hit him, knocked him flat and nearly strangled him before the waiters pulled us apart.

I only know it wasn’t me that did that. I was watching, from a lone dark corner, and the betrayal leaking from me, water from a drowning man. Blood is salty, you know. Like seawater, and tears.

\---

It’s too warm in the flat, overwarm, and my jumper is thick and coarse and binding, off-white rope and canvas wrapping my heated skin, buoyed in the chair that rolls on waves of red nubby fabric and dim warm light. My feet are on his chair, near his hip. I don’t remember putting them there.

I am rocking forward and back, close and farther, and he is fading in and out like an unfocused camera shot, poorly framed, too much colour, not enough light.

My feet are bare. My feet are bare but not cold; it’s too warm here and I want the jumper gone, I want my skin to breathe, to exhale all the years of loneliness, let it evaporate the icy crust from my heart, the salty tracks on my cheeks. I can breathe again, and I take gulps of air, great greedy lungfuls of the warmth and the red and the sight of him across from me, my compass in the night.

It’s so easy to breathe. I could close my eyes and just do that, for days and years and centuries, his voice in my ear, his warmth so close to my feet; wrapped in memory and comfort and all the things I never let myself think about.

I could stay. I could breathe again. Maybe it could be like this, stay like this.

Maybe I shouldn’t go.

\---

I make him tea one day, and there are no spoons, none in the drawer, none in the sink or on the counter, and I stare for a bit at the cabinet, frowning, and he calls from the living room, sunk up to his neck in data.

His fingers wrap around the mug when I hand it over, and for a second my hand is trapped between his and the warm porcelain.

The tea will cool on the table near his hand, and he won’t drink it, not while he’s working, but it’s enough that it is there, smudged with my invisible fingerprints, a piece of me in his sight.

I sigh and return to the kitchen, take my tea to the window, and it is clearer and colder than it’s been in a good long while. The sky is ice-bright and blue, and I squint. I drink my tea too fast, and he doesn’t touch his at all, and the silence is a calm floating sea where I can rest my thoughts a bit.

When I dump the empty mug in the sink and head for the loo, I find the spoons.  Of course.  Settled on the windowsill, above the tub, a row of jam jars planted with silver teaspoons and chemicals. Obviously an experiment, the bugger, had to nick all the spoons and bury them in toxic waste to study their rate of erosion or some such nonsense; how do I put up with this, really, it’s a miracle I don’t kill him again, myself, do it properly. I could, you know, I’ve had my bad days.

The medicine cabinet door slams a little harder than necessary, perhaps, but in the mirror I am smiling.

Before I leave for work, I fish out the last, least injured spoon from its coffin and wash it, rubbing my fingers against the finish, coaxing out a dull shine before I place it in the otherwise empty drawer with a dramatic flourish and bang the whole thing shut.

He’s still frozen in thought, hands to lips and tea ice-cold, but he nods when I leave and his eyes are the pale blue of snowmelt and early spring skies, and the hallway echoes with my unspoken shout, my fingers steady and sure on the door as I step, unburdened, into the street.

\---

His hands are in mine, his fingers around my wrists and his breath is mine, his scent in my nose, my nose on his cheek, on his neck, and oh god his lips are on mine and when did this happen; I can’t breathe for his weight and his smell of soap and stolen cigarettes; I am dizzy with his warmth and his hands his hands--

Fingers on my stomach on my ribs and nudging at my breastbone; he runs cold, of course he does, but I am burning in his hands.

His mouth catches on mine, sticks, and I wrap a hand in his curls, silky strands wound in-between my fingers; he pulls me closer and his hips grind into my stomach; his collarbones call my lips, and I answer, tracing the smooth hard swells and tender hollows with my tongue, my swollen hot mouth, and I swallow his moans, keep back my own; my heart is a drum solo; he presses a hand to my chest, fingers settling in between the dips of the bones there, and I can feel him everywhere.

I want to swallow him whole, dessert on a silver spoon, sink my teeth into his cold brilliant sweetness, wrap his skin around mine and breathe him in all day, tasting him faint on my tongue. I want, I want, and my back finds the wall as his hands find my hips and christ this is it, isn’t it, there’s no going back but who would want to, when his heart pounds under my lips, tracing the swell of his jugular, and his eyes are glazed with my name, his mouth worrying over my sharp edges, smoothing out the rough bits and filling the empty places.

He licks my neck like a wound, and I am one great bleeding gash, physician heal thyself but it’s too late, it’s far too late, and so there will be no help, no ambulance, but I don’t need it, any of it; he’s here to solve my murder since it’s long past time to save my life, I’m dead and gone and have been since he’s been the same and it’s too late now for anything but this, but us.

My legs clench around his waist, and my head hits the wall when he---

Oh god

My clothes shred like paper under his desperate hands, find the wound stem the flow but it’s too late, I’m a crime scene and this is what he does.

Find me solve me save me

His hands in mine, his mouth on mine, his heart is mine of course it is, that’s how I’m still alive, still breathing, because he lived for me while I was dead, when I thought he was dead, he breathed my breath and pumped my blood in his veins, my best friend, my best whatever-this-is and he’s given himself to me he gives himself over and his eyes close as he falls again and again and this time I fall with him.

We slide to the floor and it is cold and slightly damp but his gasping fractured breath is soothing, is like the ocean pulling me in, rinsing me clean, and I let it sweep over me, let it bring me in to shore.

We lie washed up on the kitchen floor until the storm settles. When I open my eyes he is watching me and that is a look I could live with for the rest of my life, all the great long years stretched out and I am brimming with saltwater and joy, and fierce welling love.

When I kiss him I taste blood, and tears, and I know they are not mine.

\---

I should get up.

I really should; I’ve got the surgery in a hour, or maybe two, I can’t see the clock from here, but the light is weak watery grey and it’s two bells in the morning watch.

Dawn creeps round the curtains, dust in the air, and I watch the light touch on his skin, white even against the sheets, and I want to put my hands there, right there where it breaks across the line of his shoulder, his scapula sharp-edged under the softness of his skin.

Maybe I should go now, before it gets worse.

And it will, it will because it’s been less than a day, less than twelve hours and I want to touch so badly it’s killing me, again. I want to reach out and curl the edges of my roughened fingers over his bones, sink them into the soft vulnerable hollows by his throat and stay, letting his heartbeat lull me, because I don’t know yet if I can keep this, if this is something I can have, and somewhere I think of mismatched spoons in cups and behind my desperately closed eyes the image of a half-empty flat swims to the surface, a body sleeping in half of a bed, and her hair would be gentle gold in the same morning light.

His fingers are around my wrist, startlingly icy, and he rolls over slow and languorous, sheets catching in all the places they shouldn’t, and pulls me in, draws me close, and I let him, of course I do, christ is there anything he could do, anything he could ask that I would deny.

I should get up, and he shakes his head without my having spoken, curls dark and mussed on the pillow, and I am glad he has not opened his eyes, that he cannot see what I am now, how far he has taken me and how much I would do, would give up, to keep it this way.

Dawn over the edges of the flats opposite, and I am still lost at sea, the edges of the world blurred, and we could go anywhere from here, literally anything could happen, and it frightens me how much I want that.

He flinches slightly, and I realise my hand is cupping the back of his neck, band of gold stark against the darkness of his hair. I clench my fingers, letting the soft curls swallow the dull gleam, drown it, and his mouth curls up in half a smile.

I should get up now. But I won’t.


End file.
